Time and Time Again

11

STANTON STUDIED GERMAN through Christmas week, New Year and most of January, every morning, seven days a week. He spent the afternoons in physical training and then had supper with McCluskey either in the Master’s Lodge or in a pub. Sometimes they’d be joined by experts on various aspects of early-twentieth-century life but usually they dined alone. During these suppers McCluskey’s conversation centred almost exclusively around the parlous moral, cultural and environmental state of the planet.

In February, his language lessons were cut back to two hours a day and Stanton began to focus more fully on a study of the spring and summer of 1914. Various experts from among the Companions of Chronos arrived daily at the Master’s Lodge to assist him in cramming everything he possibly could about the diplomatic, political, military and cultural landscape of Europe in the months leading up to the Great War. He also studied practical matters, train and boat timetables, hotels and currency, plus motor mechanics and even the rudiments of how to fly an early aeroplane, subjects of which he already had a working knowledge. And of course he practised with the various items of equipment the Companions had designed for him to take with him: the computer back-up, the weapons and ammunition, the medical kit, and the various IDs, official letters, bills and currencies.

Time passed quickly. Winter turned to a surprisingly old-fashioned spring and a rare period of clement weather made the campus beautiful. Young female undergraduates seemed to blossom like fresh flowers among the ancient stones, wafting about the place in their breeze-rippled summer dresses.

‘Enjoy the view,’ McCluskey said as she and Stanton crossed the quad one morning. ‘Won’t be any short skirts where you’re going. Not till about 1926 anyway. Perhaps not even then. After all, it was the Great War that liberated the independent woman and there isn’t going to be one this time.’

They were on their way through the town to West Road where the History faculty was situated.

‘I brought sandwiches,’ McCluskey said, tapping her vast handbag, ‘so we’ll have a working lunch.’

‘I’ve often wondered what you keep in those handbags of yours. Looks like you could fit the kitchen sink in.’

McCluskey was a woman who never ventured out without a substantial handbag over her shoulder. She had a fine and varied selection, some of which appeared to be actual antiques.

‘What a woman keeps in her handbag is one of the ancient secrets of our sex and were I to tell you I should have to have you castrated.’

‘Well, don’t then. Where are we going, by the way?’

‘The Incident Room.’

‘Incident Room?’

‘Well, it’s just a tutorial room in the History faculty really but our espionage bloke was with the Special Branch before he retired and he wants to call it the Incident Room, so who are we to argue? Today we are investigating a murder. The tragedy at Sarajevo. The killing that screwed the twentieth century.’

The Incident Room had been well named, for that was just what it had been turned into. An old-style police murder room. The walls were covered with maps and diagrams of Sarajevo and Belgrade and of the mountainous area between, with routes traced upon them and arrows pointing to significant locations. There were numerous photographs of buildings, streets and of weapons, all connected by strips of various coloured ribbons. And of course the main protagonists in the tragedy: the Archduke and Duchess themselves staring grimly out from the centre of the display; Gavrilo Princip, the killer, closest to them, as he had been at the moment of their deaths. Princip was surrounded by various other sallow-faced young men who had been his comrades on the fateful day. Then the soldiers, Serbian army officers at one end of the wall and Austrian at the other. The former who plotted the murder, and the latter who so spectacularly failed to prevent it.

‘It’s all on the computer you’ve been given,’ a hawkish-looking old man remarked. He had a granite-hard Glaswegian accent and a great hooked nose that could have torn flesh from carrion. ‘But Ah like things old school, stuck up on a wall where Ah can see ’em.’

‘This is Commander Davies,’ McCluskey explained. ‘Late of the Scottish Special Branch. Now retired. Our chief strategist.’

‘Happy Easter,’ Stanton said, shaking his hand.

‘Nothing very happy about it as far as Ah can see,’ Davies snapped back. ‘The country’s buggered, the planet’s buggered and Ah’m buggered. We’ll get straight down t’ business, shall we?’

‘By all means.’

‘Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević,’ Davies said, levelling a laser pointer at the central picture on the Serbian end of the display. ‘As hard a bastard as ever drew breath. Known then and now as Apis. The man who organized the killing that started the Great War. Do y’know anything about the man?’

‘He was the head of the Serbian Secret Service,’ Stanton replied.

‘Aye, he was, and also, as is the way with spies, its principal foe. As fervent a pan-Serbian nationalist as ever drew breath. Led a secret terrorist organization inside his own department called Unification Or Death. Better known to history as the Black Hand.’

Davies said the words with flinty relish, like some ancient laird cursing a rival clan.

‘The Black Hand! Don’t you love it?’ McCluskey said, slapping her thigh. ‘If you’re going to organize a ring of assassins you might as well give it a blood-and-thunder name, eh? These days they’d probably have called it a Neutralization Operative Committee.’

Stanton studied the photograph on the wall marked ‘Apis’. Black uniform, white gloves. Sabre. A chest full of medals, golden epaulettes on his shoulders, a plumed fez on his head. An imperial, kaiser-style moustache sitting heavily on cruel pursed lips. An arrogant, cold-eyed killer. Stanton knew the type, he’d met plenty, and the fact that some of them had been on his own side didn’t make him like them any better.

‘You want me to prevent the assassination by killing him?’ Stanton asked. ‘I mean, in our little game of what if, he’s your target?’

‘Well, he certainly held all the cards. And he certainly deserved a bullet. Terrible terrrrible man. Murderrrrous man.’ Davies seemed to chew each word, rolling his r’s with morbid pleasure. ‘Y’d no want to meet him in a dark alley. But then y’d no want to meet any member of the Serrrrbian military in a dark alleyway. Not then and not now. Crazed fanatical bastards to a man. Friend Dimitrijević was a man of truly savage brutality. D’y ken how he earned his position as Serbia’s Chief of Espionage?’

‘Not really,’ Stanton replied.

‘By organizing and perrrsonally leading the brutal murder of his own king! How’s that for audacity? You couldna’ make it up. Friend Apis thought the monarch he served was too conciliatory to the Austrians so he decided to kill him and install a king that better suited his taste. I say kill, butcher would be a better word. Because in 1903, him and a gang of cronies, all crown officers, mind, who’d sworn an oath of loyalty, stormed the royal palace. They shot their way through the building, forced the king’s guards to reveal where the royal couple were hiding, then shot King Alexander thirty times and Queen Draga eighteen. They then stripped the bullet-riddled corpses naked, slashed them up with their sabres and threw them out of the palace window.’

‘They did things rough in those days,’ McCluskey observed.

‘Aye, they did, professor. They most certainly did. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a more violent spy. Or, and here’s the point, Captain Stanton, a cooler one. Because the very next day he installs a different king and makes himself Chief of Intelligence. He then proceeds to dominate espionage in Central Europe for the following decade, culminating in the Sarajevo assassination. I would say it’s no exaggeration to say that in June 1914 this man was the most dangerous man in the world. The question is: should we kill him?’

‘Well, obviously,’ McCluskey said, digging in her handbag for a sandwich.

‘Ah’m askin’ your man here, professor. Not you.’

Stanton stared at the photograph of Apis for a full minute before replying.

‘It seems to me,’ he said finally, ‘that if we try to kill this man, one of two things will happen. Either we bungle it or we succeed.’

McCluskey snorted loudly as if she’d expected better of Stanton but Davies nodded.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘If we bungle it, which I think is the more likely outcome, we’ll have seriously spooked him.’

‘Why would we bungle it?’ McCluskey protested through a mouthful of tuna mayonnaise. ‘I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit. You’re Guts Stanton, remember!’

‘Prof, this guy stormed a palace in 1903 and personally killed his own King and Queen. Yet he’s still alive and pulling the strings in the same palace more than a decade later. Just how good a survivor do you think he’d have to be to manage that? Colonel Apis must have been the most tempting espionage target on the whole continent. Every other spy in the game would have dreamt of taking him out. But not one of them did. Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević was second-guessing assassins before breakfast. So let’s not make the mistake of thinking that just because we’re coming at him from the future armed with a slightly better gun, Apis is suddenly going to present a soft target.’

‘But that’s the point, Hugh! We have hindsight,’ McCluskey countered. ‘We know many of his movements from historical documents; that gives us a massive advantage.’

‘Exactly. So I get close enough to take a shot but for any number of reasons don’t finish him off? What’s he going to conclude? That a time-travelling assassin has used history books to trace him? No. He’s going to presume his network has been infiltrated and therefore all of his plans are compromised. He will put the Black Hand in lock-down and clean it out root and branch. He’ll cancel the Sarajevo plot without any doubt, put Princip and the whole team to sleep and bide his time before beginning entirely afresh.’

Davies grunted approvingly.

‘Stanton is absolutely right,’ he said. ‘A failed attempt would be a disaster.’

‘Well, nothing’s foolproof, of course,’ McCluskey grumbled. ‘But if we succeed!’

‘Yes. let’s presume for a moment our killer succeeds,’ Stanton went on. ‘He goes back in time and manages to put a bullet into the heart of the most experienced and accomplished spy in Europe. What will the repercussions be? It certainly won’t mean the end of the Black Hand organization, that’s for sure. Martyred leaders cast long shadows. Apis had comrades, blood brothers, men as tough and as fanatically devoted to the Serbian cause as he was. Look at them, Antić … Dulić … Marinković and Popović.’

Stanton turned to the grainy photographs that surrounded Apis on the wall, all connected by strips of green fabric tape. Hard-eyed men with frozen stares. Each one of them could easily have been a murderer or a cop, and of course each one of them was both.

‘What will these men do with their leader slain? One thing’s for sure: they won’t give up. In fact, they’ll be yearning for revenge. So who will they blame? Again, not a hitman from the future. They will blame their mortal enemy, the Austro-Hungarian Secret Service, and they will react by attacking the Austro-Hungarians where it hurts most. By killing one of their royals. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, for example. So by taking out Apis we don’t remove the threat to the Archduke at all. We merely place the planning of it in the hands of different people. People whose plans we wouldn’t know. Killing Apis is, in fact, as bad as failing to kill him because it removes our single ace. We know what Apis did. We know he had the Archduke killed on the twenty-eighth of June 1914 and we know how he did it. If that day changes we’ll be as much in the dark as the Austrians were at the time. The only certain way to prevent the murder of Franz Ferdinand is to stop the man who actually killed him from pulling the trigger and to do so at the last possible moment.’

For the first time Davies’s hard, craggy face seemed almost to smile, his thin lips grimacing like a knife cut in a mouldy lemon.

‘You chose y’ man well, professor,’ he said.

‘Yes, well, I told you he was good,’ McCluskey said, slightly huffily. ‘You didn’t believe me at the time.’

The brief shadow of a smile disappeared as Davies turned his hawkish countenance back to Stanton.

‘Verrrry true. If I were honest with you, Captain Stanton—’

‘Ex-captain,’ Stanton corrected. ‘The Regiment chucked me out.’

‘Exactly. And when the Chronos Intelligence Committee assembled last spring I didn’t relish the idea of entrusting the future of European civilization to a man who’d sacrificed a promising army career in favour of media celebrity.’

‘Well, that’s not quite how—’

‘But it’s a fool who won’t admit when he’s wrong. And I like your style, son, I really do. McCluskey was right, you’re the man for the job. The first part of which is to get to Sarajevo two months from now and neutralize the man who killed the Archduke.’

‘Gavrilo Princip,’ Stanton said.

‘Aye. Princip. The man who fired the first shot of the Great War.’

‘Stupid, stupid bastard,’ McCluskey muttered bitterly.

All three of them turned towards the photo on the wall. An absurdly youthful-looking lad of nineteen, his sad, slightly bewildered expression and deep-set, almost romantic eyes stared back at them from an image that had been reproduced millions of times in the last century.

Could it really be possible that Stanton would be looking into those actual eyes in eight weeks’ time? He was almost beginning to believe that it could.